If Only President Obama Would Do Something About The Prison Population

Adam Gopnik’s moral outrage about the shameful level of incarceration in the U.S. is right on target. However, the analysis in his New Yorker article is weak in multiple places, most notably in missing the biggest story going in incarceration these days.

At the time President Obama was elected, the incarcerated population in the U.S. had risen every single year since the Bureau of Justice Statistics began keeping records in 1980. Given the self-sustaining force of that historical trend, turning it around would be a herculean feat for a president, particularly because most incarceration happens at the state level.